Jumpin' Jesus, "Joe the Plumber" Might Actually Win

We should all be clear about this simple fact. Calling Sam Wurzelbacher, candidate for Congress in Ohio's new 9th Congressional District, "Joe The Plumber" in an alleged news story is precisely the same as calling the former mayor of Carmel, California, "Will Munny," instead of Clint Eastwood, or the former Georgia congressman "Cooter Davenport," instead of Ben Jones. Joe The Plumber is a character this guy once played on television. Reporters should knock this stuff off before it really gets out of hand.

Because this guy could win.

Yes, he has no experience, even as a plumber. Yes, he talks in what can fairly be called blue-collar baby-talk. ("I just can't stand it when people do bad work. And we've been voting, the last 40 or 50 years, [for] bad people to do bad things to us. Why have we been doing it? Because we don't take our civic responsibility seriously enough." Key word there, in case you missed it, is "bad.") But he is a celebrity, which counts. And this is Ohio, where the politics are completely screwy, and where the legislature cleverly has pitted two progressive icons — Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur — against each other in what may be a bloodbath of a primary. And the polling for the 2012 congressional races is generally all over the map. And I have, in my lifetime, lived under governments which contained within themselves the interesting conceptual art experiments of Congressman Cooter, Congressman Gopher from Love Boat, Congressman Sonny Bono, and President Ronald Reagan. I firmly believe that anything is possible in this great Republic. This is why I hide under the bed a lot.

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The inevitability of today's announcement is what makes it so very, very sad.

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